Rod Dreher: War & Culture War

[Kamaji]

War & Culture War

By Rod Dreher
February 28, 2022

An op-ed contributor to the NYTimes, Emily Tamkin, writes about “How The American Right Stopped Worrying And Learned To Love Russia.” She mentions me in her piece:

Many of the admirers of the world’s strongmen on the American right appear to believe that the countries each of these men lead are beacons of whiteness, Christianity and conservative values. On Wednesday, conservative commentator Rod Dreher wrote, “I adamantly oppose risking the lives of boys from Louisiana and Alabama to make the Donbass safe for genderqueers and migrants.”

Typical moronic analysis. “Beacons of whiteness” — good grief. Emily Tamkin has an expensive education, but she is an ignoramus. At least she linked to the long post where I made that intentionally hyperbolic comment. Here’s more context from that essay (emphasis in the original):

To repeat myself: I am opposed to Russia’s actions in Ukraine. I think Russia should leave Ukraine alone, but whatever happens, I am adamantly against following the US leadership into hawkish actions against the Russians. It’s not at all because I support Russia or in any way approve of what it’s doing. (I hope Russian families and Russian soldiers stop to think about what exorbitant cost is extracted from them so that Putin can restore Greater Russia.) It’s rather that I am sick to the point of puking of these people — the American elites — sh*tting all over so many of us, yet expecting us to send our sons (and daughters) to fight its damn wars. Especially when the goal is to extend American political and cultural hegemony over the world, to allow the Western-oriented elites in those countries to ruin the lives of the normal people in those places in the same way they have ruined ours.

Put another way, I adamantly oppose risking the lives of boys from Louisiana and Alabama to make the Donbass safe for genderqueers and migrants. If that makes me a reactionary troll, fine, I’ll own that. I love my country and would put my life on the line to fight for her against foreign invaders. But we are not the good guys I used to think we were. We can’t even protect schoolgirls in Louisiana and Alabama from this toxic ideology that is destroying their moral sense, but they expect us to gear up in case we are called to fight for Ukraine?

And, as you know if you’ve been reading this blog these past few days, I repeatedly condemn Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. What you don’t learn from Tamkin about what I wrote in that very post is that in it, I regret falling victim in 2002 to the right-wing warmongers who took us to the bad war in Iraq. Weirdly enough for someone Tamkin accuses of having a thing for whiteness, I mentioned favorably Muhammad Ali’s apocryphal quote that he was refusing to go fight in Vietnam because he did not want to fight foreigners on behalf of a racist regime at home. In fact, the thrust of the entire piece was about how American elites of both right and left expect everybody to jump all aboard their military crusades, despite the fact that that same ruling class despises many of them as deplorable.

None of this context appears in the Tamkin piece. In fact, she not only smears me as pro-Putin, even though my denunciation of Russia’s warmongering appeared in the very same column she quotes, but she also links conservative like Tucker Carlson, Pat Buchanan, and me to stone-cold racists and neofascists like Richard Spencer (who has publicly denounced me in the past) and Matthew Heimbach.

This is why I hate The New York Times, which epitomizes the utter dishonesty of the Left. All Tamkin seems to care about regarding the war is that critics of knee-jerk US militarism like me aren’t onside regarding identity politics. The lives of our kids, I guess, are disposable to her in this potential war between the US and Russia. All she knows is that she hates Putin because he’s a right-winger, so everyone who is not willing to rush idiotically into World War III can only be a bigot — and we know what they deserve, right?

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Source:  https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/war-culture-war/

[Kamaji]

Another bon mot paragraph from the article:

I know — truly, I do — people who are grateful that they have guns, not because they think they’re going to have to use them one day to fight invading Russians, but because they fear they might have to use them one day to fight Emily Tamkin’s class. I used to think they were paranoid. After the Canadian truckers’ protest, I no longer do.